Twenty-eight years ago a boy, well-built and with an extraordinarily deep voice, received a gold medal in recognition of his fine work on a piece of cloth which he had shaped into a garment. The Vienna Academy for Tailors proceeded to admit the youth into full standing as a member of the trade, and licensed him to look for work in any shop. His name was Emanuel List.
Born in 1890 in the Jewish Bezirke of the gay old city, Emanuel was the youngest child in a family of five and the only son. The family was in desperate poverty. Its breadwinner earned a meagre livelihood peddling dry goods. The Lists had barely enough money to support two daughters and a healthy young son, but the latter was sent nonetheless to the Talmud Torah. Hebrew school, where he mastered his letters and studied for confirmation.
So that when after serving his apprenticeship Emanuel started out as a tailor, there was much cause for rejoicing in the List household. An income was assured. Mr. List senior, stopped worrying.
“I can remember my father very well,” said Emanuel List. “I can remember him taking me close to him and telling me stories of his childhood. He knew how to sing old Hebrew melodies. I liked them a great deal.”
YOUNG WAGE EARNER
The now internationally famous opera star is not sentimental but he smiled when he told how, for the first time, he turned over his small earnings to the family.
He is a heavy man, with strong features and a powerful voice which has spoken for Richard Wagner’s rich musical drama, and those of Gluck, Weber, Verdi and Mozart.
“Our family was always hard up. We worked for the bare necessities of life. Today I know the value of a dollar. No matter how much money I have, I never forget its value. Poverty teaches a good lesson.”
At fourteen, Emanuel List left the Volksschule, an elementary school in Vienna and went to work as tailor’s apprentice. He remembers well today the fateful day in his life when a want advertisement in an Austrian newspaper calling for the services of a chorus boy attracted his attention. He got the job in the Theater an der Wien. Grueneke, chorus master, was pleased with Emanuel’s deep voice.
“Tell me, young man, what have you got in your throat?” asked Grueneke with surprise when he first listened to the voice.
“If it’s a frog, he won’t come out,” roared List.
SANG MINOR ROLES
For many months Emanuel sang minor roles in the music stories of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann. His real career began when together with Leopold Newmann, Fritz Mendlinck and Albert Schaeffer, he organized the Austrian quartet and started on a tour of Europe.
The group met with success in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Harbin and what was then St. Petersburg. now Leningrad. In Berlin, the four vocalists “busted up,” but Emanuel List refused to go home. He repaired to Paris and studied with Edouard DeReczke but found that he was making little progress.
In 1912, at twenty-two, List found himself pressed for funds which until now had been coming in a rich and steady stream. He went to London and worked in a vaudeville house. When the war broke out in Europe, List came to the United States on the S. S. St. Paul.
“My heart stood still when after twelve days of nothing but sea and sky, I saw the outlines of New York’s buildings,” he said. I walked the streets of the city like a little worm. Most of my money was in an English bank, and I couldn’t take it out. I was an Austrian and from an enemy’s country.
“I came to America with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket. I didn’t know exactly what I was to do. The York Hotel was pretty reasonable and I took a room there.
“In two weeks time I was broke. Money goes so easily. You can never tell how, but it goes. I looked for a job but didn’t find anything to suit me.
“Then came the hardest days of my life. I was alone in a large city and broke. Of course I left the hotel, and moved into a boarding house downtown in which artists who were not very well off lived.
“I met a man named Burnside who directed musical work at the Hippodrome. He gave me a chance in a minstrel show, and I thought that the next few years would be easy sailing. I wanted to devote as much of my spare time as possible to studying opera.
“But the great blow came when suddenly I was dismissed without notice. America had entered the war. My savings were robbed from my trunk. I was told I would have to leave the boarding house. I didn’t know whither to turn.
“By some freak chance I got a job singing for forty dollars a week in the Bismark Restaurant in Yorkville.”
Mr. List said that fortune was “not slow in smiling once more upon me.” He was booked for a traveling show which he learned after a few rehearsals was a burlesque. It was a “clean burlesque,” and because he needed the substantial sum of seventy dollars a week, he stayed with them.
AMERICA VISITED
“On this tour I learned really to know the American people,” he said. “I learned that the Americans are not the hard, rough-edged people they are reputed to be. I made a great number of friends, and many of them come to see me to this very day. I still write to many of them.
“I was fascinated by the great West, and I learned to love much of the grand scenery of America.”
Emanuel List put his “soul into his work” of the burlesque company, and enjoyed the months he spent on the road. He wrote to his family in Vienna and sent them money.
Back in New York he encountered a Mr. Riesenfeld who remarked when he heard List’s voice: “Musikalisches Rindvich.” List was told to become an artist. His voice was good, its tone rich and beautiful, but lacked “finesse.”
For three short weeks he studied with Joshua Zuro, and in 1919 re-received his first bid to sing opera-the satisfaction of a lifelong ambition.
“One of the things I did at this time was to sing Eli Eli at the Criterion Theatre for forty weeks. I think every Jew in New York must have heard me.”
In 1922, after hard application in operatic scores of which he became complete master, List went home after an absence of many years.
“I went to see my mother. I found her shrivelled and old. She had been longing to see me. I decided to stay out of the States until I had made a name as an opera singer.”
The rest of Emanuel List’s story is well known. He sang in the Berlin Municipal Opera, the festivals at Munich and Bayreuth, at the Folk opera in Vienna and in Paris grand opera.
A few days ago he cancelled all his contracts to sing in Germany.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
